I've noticed over the years there was
a short-lived revival of the traditional, Golden Age-style detective
story in the 1980s that began to sputter a decade earlier with
William
L. DeAndrea, Bill
Pronzini and John
Sladek, but quickly assumed an identity of its own – complete
with identifiable characteristics. An identity best described as a
hybrid of the American and British detective story.
Generally, the detectives tend to be
either professionals (non-detectives) acting as amateur sleuths or
hold some kind of quasi-official position with their cases taking
place against specialized backgrounds. Such as the theater, commerce
and museums or private collectors. This neon-illuminated age of the
traditional detective story even his its own sub-category of
pop-culture inspired mysteries that take place at conventions or
among fandoms, which began with Pronzini's Hoodwink
(1981) and Richard Purtill's Murdercon
(1982) added modern fandoms and pop-cult references. Good examples
are Patrick A. Kelley's little-known Sleightly
Lethal (1986) and Sharyn McCrumb's award winning Bimbos
of the Death Sun (1987).
More interestingly, these writers
showed a healthy interest in the
locked room mystery and often brought new innovative ideas to the
fore.
Herbert
Resnicow was a former civil engineer who brought his drafting
pencil to the detective story and turned the locked room puzzle on
its head by turning wide open, three-dimensional and multi-floored
spaces into tightly sealed rooms – making him one of the leading
lights of this brief revival. Resnicow penned about half a dozen of
these innovative locked room puzzles, all with specialized
backgrounds, but his best two are The
Gold Deadline (1984) and The
Dead Room (1987). Marcia
Muller is not as closely associated with the impossible crime
story as her husband, but she engineered one of her own large-scale,
museum-set locked room conundrums in The
Tree of Death (1983). Ellen Godfrey cleverly made use of the
locked computer room of a software company in Murder
Behind Locked Doors (1988) and Kate Wilhelm's experimental
Smart
House (1989) takes place in a fully automated, computerized
house. There are also some British specimens, such as Roger Ormerod's
More
Dead Than Alive (1980) and Douglas Clark's Plain
Sailing (1987), but they have the tendency to stand closer to
the European police procedural rather than the American Van
Dine-Queen style detective story. But they fit the mold.
So I may be completely wrong here with
my narrow, specialized reading creating a pattern, where there isn't
any, because similar type of mystery novels were published in the
1970s (Lionel Black's The
Penny Murders, 1979) and 1990s (Peter Lovesey's Bloodhounds,
1996). Nonetheless, they obviously proliferated during the eighties
and gives the impression of a resurgence, short-lived as it may have
been, of the traditional detective story. And it coincided with the
rise of the shin honkaku movement in Japan! But in the West it
petered out after merely a decade.
Why this long-winded introduction? The
subject of today's review made me think of all these authors, novels
and the possibility of an unrecognized Neon Age (can't think of a
better name).
Anthony
Oliver's The Elberg Collection (1985) is the third novel
in a short-lived series about a retired policeman, John Webber, and
his Welsh housekeeper, widowed Mrs. Lizzie Thomas, who appeared
together in only four detective novels – published between 1980 and
1987. These four novels appear to have a unifying theme: shenanigans
and skulduggery in the world of antique dealers and collectors.
The Elberg Collection begins on
the beach of a small, French seaside resort, Le Bosquet, where David
and Jane Walton walked, arm in arm, when Jane caught fire and turned
into "a flaming torch within seconds." David must have
tried to smother the flames, because "their arms were still
round each other when the first people got to them." French
police believes the wind blew glowing tobacco from David's pipe and "slammed the shower of blazing sparks" into her "highly
inflammable" dress. Since the incident was witnessed by a maid
and no other footprints to show someone had "approached them on
that fatal walk," the French authorities filed it away as a
bizarre accident. However, the daughter of the Waltons, Jessica
Elberg, refuses to accept the verdict.
A friendly conspiracy between
Detective Inspector Snow and Lizzie to put their recently divorced
and retired friend, ex-Detective Inspector John Webber, back in the
game by landing him his first assignment as a private investigator.
Hans Elberg has agreed to foot the bill to help his wife come to
terms with the death of her parents.
Webber warns Jessica that he has "never yet inquired deeply into the circumstances of sudden
death without upsetting some," but, once all the formalities
are settled, they begin a two-pronged investigation with the slightly
eccentric, French-speaking Lizzie crossing the channel – snooping
around the scene of the crime. Webber stays behind in England to look
into the professional side of the case. Walton was a talented potter
and part-owner of a pottery firm, which allowed him to help his
father-in-law accumulate an impressive collection of antique pottery.
What they uncover is a dead witness who left behind a dying message.
A rotting corpse of a another murder victim and a disturbingly fresh
suicide. A missing, or stolen, manuscript that could throw "a
spanner into the international market for English pottery" and
a mysterious figure who's willing to spend both money and bullets to
get them off the case. And all of this comes with an odd assortment
of suspects, motives and clues.
One clue, in particular, deserves to
be highlighted. Snow has a young bright son, Alan, who likes
computers and dates the story by saying he writes his own programs on
a computer with 48 K RAM and "a data transfer rate of 16 bytes a
second." Snow gives his son a purely hypothetical situation,
two people impossibly burned to death on a lonely beach, to test his
analyzing program. It came back with eight possibilities that ranged
from flamethrowers, incendiary bombs and missiles to meteors,
satellite debris and an Act of God – along with the more plausible
murder/suicide or a suicide pact. You won't find the correct solution
on Alan's list, but when you learn how it was done, you realize how
cleverly it hinted in the right direction.
I think it could have been one of the
best and most original clues of the decade had Oliver played the game
fairly across the board.
I could have easily forgiven the
obvious murderer, who stood out like a billboard, but the sudden,
anti-climatic ending revealed that Webber and Lizzie had been
investigating only one side of the case. The case has an entirely
different angle that throws an entirely new light on the charred
bodies, the dying message and the messy suicide, but they were left
in the dark until it was time to wrap things up. They're also told
that the murderer will never be brought in front of judge, which
makes for an unexciting and disappointing payoff to what could have
been a first-class detective novel.
Webber at least got the satisfaction
of explaining to the big bugs how the Waltons were burned to death
and the fire-trick, in theory, is excellent and a perfect example of
the impossible crime story moving along with the times. Something
fresh and original. Practically, the fire-trick has a glaring
weakness that can be partially blamed for the weak ending.
The Elberg Collection is the
proverbial mixed bag of tricks. A leisurely paced, thoroughly British
detective novel with some good and original ideas, but the weak and
botched ending only makes it worth your time if your interested
in plot-mechanics or obscure impossible crime novels.
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